Doc Holliday

The Life and Legend

Gary L. Roberts

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780470128220, 9780471262916
• eBook ISBN: 9781118130971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Acclaim for Doc Holliday
"Splendid... not only the most readable yet definitive study of Holliday yet published, it is one of the best biographies of nineteenth-century Western 'good-bad men' to appear in the last twenty years. It was so vivid and gripping that I read it twice."
--Howard R. Lamar, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History, Yale University, and author of The New Encyclopedia of the American West "The history of the American West is full of figures who have lived on as romanticized legends. They deserve serious study simply because they have continued to grip the public imagination. Such was Doc Holliday, and Gary Roberts has produced a model for looking at both the life and the legend of these frontier immortals."
--Robert M. Utley, author of The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull "Doc Holliday emerges from the shadows for the first time in this important work of Western biography. Gary L. Roberts has put flesh and soul to the man who has long been one of the most mysterious figures of frontier history. This is both an important work and a wonderful read."
--Casey Tefertiller, author of Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend "Gary Roberts is one of a foremost class of writers who has created a real literature and authentic history of the so-called Western. His exhaustively researched and beautifully written Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend reveals a pathetically ill and tortured figure, but one of such intense loyalty to Wyatt Earp that it brought him limping to the O.K. Corral and into the glare of history."
--Jack Burrows, author of John Ringo: The Gunfighter Who Never Was "Gary L. Roberts manifested an interest in Doc Holliday at a very early age, and he has devoted these past thirty-odd years to serious and detailed research in the development and writing of Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend. The world knows Holliday as Doc Holliday. Family members knew him as John. Somewhere in between the two lies the real John Henry Holliday. Roberts reflects this concept in his writing. This book should be of interest to Holliday devotees as well as newly found readers."
--Susan McKey Thomas, cousin of Doc Holliday and coauthor of In Search of the Hollidays

Chapter 1

CHILD OF THE SOUTHERN FRONTIER

[T]o ignore the frontier and time in setting up a conception of the social state of the Old South is to abandon reality. For the history of the South throughout a very great part of the period from the opening of the nineteenth century to the Civil War…is mainly the history of the roll of frontier upon frontier—and on to the frontier beyond.

—W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South

The Old South is more an idea than a place or a time. In the popular mind it conjures up images of white-columned plantation houses surrounded by moss-bound oaks, magnolias, dogwoods, and azaleas in bloom, vast fields of cotton, gangs of slaves, and the full range of characters straight out of Gone with the Wind. Perhaps that is why it is almost irresistible to think of Doc Holliday as the scion of a plantation family or why one biographer could not resist characterizing him as “aristocracy’s outlaw.”1 His story is infused with what might be called the Southern mystique as thoroughly and profoundly as it is with the legend of the last frontier. And so, the man behind the myth is both magnified and obscured by a double distortion.

Ironically, from the beginning John Henry Holliday was as much a child of the frontier as he was of the Old South. Indeed, he lived most of his youth on what was even then known as the Southern frontier. Georgia was the youngest of the original thirteen colonies, and although the young country of which it was part had pushed westward all the way to the Pacific Ocean by the time he was born, John Henry’s childhood was spent in the red-clay country of Georgia only a few years distant from the time that the region was the domain of the Creek Nation. When the course of the Civil War persuaded his father that he should move his family beyond the reach of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s armies, the young John Henry was transplanted into the piney woods and wiregrass of southwest Georgia, a thinly populated region of subsistence farmers and free grazers until the railroad gave it life and opened up economic opportunities in much the same way that the railroad generated the boomtowns of the last West.

Despite its ambitious claims, Georgia entered the nineteenth century still largely the homeland of the Creeks and the Cherokees. The tidewater region was already shifting its economic base from rice and indigo to the Sea Island cotton that would revitalize slavery and bring prosperity to the state, but the tidewater could not hold the burgeoning population. Restless settlers were pushing west along rivers into the interior, mindless of the claims of the natives and certain of their own “right” to be there.2

There was a Celtic edge on the invasion. Willful, sensate sorts, the Scots, the Irish, and the Scots-Irish generated a “Cracker” culture marked by fighting, drinking, gambling, fishing, hunting, idleness, and independence. They faced Georgia’s frontier with the same leisurely attitudes of their Scottish and Irish forebears, and the open-range tradition they brought with them moved them into the interior before the agricultural potential was fully realized and created a values system at odds with the stern Yankee Puritanism and nascent capitalism that held sway to the north.3

At the heart of this Southern society was a fierce determination of its people to resist restrictions on their independence and movement. Their belligerence first manifested itself in their contest with the Indians. The Creeks did not call white Georgians E-cun-nau-nux-ulgee (People-greedily-grasping-after-land) for nothing.4 Settlers assumed a right to go where they chose, and Georgia was perpetually a thorn in the side of not only the natives but federal Indian policy as well. In the nineteenth century, Georgia developed a liberal land lottery system for the distribution of land as an incentive to dispossession of the Indians, and in the first four decades of the 1800s, sixty-nine counties were created, while the population soared from 162,000 to 691,000.5

By November 1827, the last claims of the Creeks were ceded at the second Treaty of Indian Springs not far from where John Henry would be born, and Georgia turned its sights on the Cherokees as the last obstacle to Georgia’s sovereignty over lands within its boundaries. The Cherokees attempted to avoid the fate of other tribes through acculturation. They sought to avoid being labeled as “savages” by adopting “civilized” ways. The Cherokees had a written constitution, their own alphabet, a newspaper, schools, an elected legislature, and a permanent capitol at New Echota. Georgia ignored constitutional restrictions on its powers to deal with the Indian tribes and declared on December 28, 1828, that the Cherokee Nation was part of Georgia and subject to its laws. Later, even after the U.S. Supreme Court took a hand in restraining its excesses, Georgia ignored court edicts as well as treaty rights and began the process of overrunning Cherokee lands and suppressing Cherokee laws. Following the discovery of gold in North Georgia in 1829 and the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, the state ordered Cherokee lands to be surveyed in 1831, divided the region into ten new counties the following year, and gave away the land to whites in the Cherokee Lottery of 1833.6

Georgia then proceeded to confiscate Cherokee lands, occupy New Echota, and destroy Sequoya’s newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, because of its opposition to removal. The federal government, rather than Georgia, eventually capitulated. Notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s clear decisions in favor of the Cherokees, President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the high court’s rulings.7 After the Georgians invaded Cherokee lands, tribal leaders appealed to Jackson directly, and he—wrongly—told them he could do nothing. When he failed to side with the Indians, the tribe divided into two factions: one accepting removal as the lesser of evils, the other determined to fight on.

Although the vast majority of Cherokees, led by John Ross, flatly opposed removal, federal authorities met with the treaty party led by Major Ridge at New Echota on December 19, 1835, and negotiated the sale of the Cherokee domain of eight million acres for $5 million, despite death threats against the treaty signers by the majority. When Ross’s faction refused to migrate, the federal government sent General Winfield Scott to forcibly remove the remaining Cherokees. Eventually, thirteen thousand men, women, and children were rounded up and herded west to the Indian Territory on the Trail of Tears.8

The Holliday family was a beneficiary of that tragic story. John Henry’s father, Henry Burroughs Holliday, was a self-made man—Andrew Jackson’s “common man”—the kind of man nineteenth-century Americans celebrated.9 His people were plain folk in the Old South. Henry’s paternal great-grandfather, William Holliday, was one of three Scotch-Irish brothers who immigrated to America from Ireland sometime after 1750. He settled in the Laurens District of South Carolina, while his brothers, “objecting to settle in slave states,” moved north, as Henry later recalled. William and his sons fought in the American Revolution with the “hero of Hornet’s Nest,” Elijah Clarke, and took their first lands in Wilkes County, Georgia, from bounties for that service.10

Later, William Jr., Henry’s grandfather, returned to Laurens County, South Carolina. There, his son, Robert Alexander Holliday, met and later married Rebecca Burroughs, whose father had also fought with Elijah Clarke in the American Revolution. Henry Holliday was born to them on March 11, 1819, the first of eleven children.11 After his father’s death, Robert relocated to Anderson County, South Carolina, and in 1831 he followed opportunity into Georgia with his family and eight slaves. He opened a tavern on the road between Newnan and Decatur near Fayetteville and eventually bought an eight-hundred-acre farm in Fayette County, which was part of the old Creek Nation. Over the years, he enlarged his holdings and became a respected and well-known citizen.12

Like most white Georgians, emboldened by President Jackson’s support of the state’s position, the Hollidays saw the Cherokee removal as inevitable and right. The bulk of General Scott’s force consisted of volunteers from Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. On May 12, 1838, young Henry, still shy of twenty, enlisted in Fayetteville as a second lieutenant in Captain John D. Stell’s company of the First Georgia Volunteers to help effect the final removal of the Cherokees from Georgia.13 By May 26, 1838, Scott began operations. He urged the troops to act with humanity and mercy, but a contemporary observer reported that “[i]n most cases the humane injunctions of the commanding general were disregarded.”14

It was disagreeable duty at best, taking men from their fields, women from the hearth, and children from play to push them at gunpoint to relocation centers, but many of the undisciplined and ill-trained militiamen seemed to enjoy the duty too much, taunting their captives and not allowing them time even to gather clothes and other items from their homes for the journey. A motley rabble followed behind the troops, burning homes and crops or moving into cabins to eat the food still cooking over the fires and to plunder the farms before the former owners were out of sight. Z. A. Zile, a Georgia militia officer who later served as a colonel in the Confederate army, would recall, “I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.”15

The Cherokees were held in makeshift stockades where sanitary conditions were awful and sickness and despair set in quickly. By June 18, General Charles Floyd of the Georgia militia reported to Governor George M. Troup that the only Cherokees left in Georgia were prisoners. General Scott now dismissed all troops save his regular army units, and the youthful Holliday, not yet twenty years old, was discharged with his company at New Echota on June 20. Having done his part to start the Cherokees west on their Trail of Tears, Henry received 160 acres of land in Pike County for his scant service and turned his thoughts to his own future.16

The rich red clay of the region was slowly freed from the forest by the sweat of white men and black men and turned under to become the new heart of Georgia’s cotton belt. The luxuriant Sea Island cotton would not grow well there, but the cotton gin made short-staple cotton practical and profitable. These developments allowed cotton to flourish in the upcountry, but Georgia’s economy was much more diverse than popular myth allows. Corn, wheat, oats, rice, tobacco, sweet potatoes, molasses, honey, butter, horses, mules, sheep, cattle, and swine completed a remarkably diverse agrarian way of life. White settlers poured into the new country of the piedmont, and early arrivals like the Hollidays made the most of their opportunities in the new country they had confiscated.17 Henry settled at the new town of Griffin.

But if Henry Holliday was the product of the forces that glorified the common man in the “age of Jackson,” his was also a society driven by notions of honor, manhood, family, and community. Henry could claim no genteel tradition. There is much in the myth of the Old South about class. Both the cavalier tradition and the Northern critique of Southern life assume a rigid class system in the South similar to the class structure of Georgian England.18

Despite the pretensions of some, it was always largely a fiction in much of the Old South. This is not to say that there were no social distinctions, but that they have been misunderstood. In the first place, there were simply too many planters who wore white gloves to hide the calloused hands that betrayed their common origins and who shared values with the great bulk of ordinary Southerners. Outside of Virginia and a slender strip of tidewater through the Carolinas and Georgia, inherited wealth and position simply did not exist. The great heart of the Cotton Kingdom was frontier. There, rank, and even wealth, were not controlling factors in the measure of men. As was true on other frontiers, the great virtues and marks of distinction were more personal. Courage, stren...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: The Measure of A Man
• Chapter 1: Child of the Southern Frontier
• Chapter 2: The World Turned Upside Down
• Chapter 3: Gone to Texas
• Chapter 4: Cow Towns and Pueblos
• Chapter 5: The Price of A Reputation
• Chapter 6: Friends and Enemies
• Chapter 7: The Fremont Street Fiasco
• Chapter 8: Vengeance
• Chapter 9: The Out Trail
• Chapter 10: A Holliday in Denver
• Chapter 11: A Living-and Dying-Legend
• Chapter 12: The Anatomy of a Western Legend
• Epilogue: The Measure of A Legend
• Notes
• Index